Addressing a press conference here today, he said of them, 86 towers would be erected in rural areas to improve mobile phone connectivity there.

The non-functioning cell phone towers would also be activated, he added.

He said there were 2,45,317 working landline phone connections in Tiruchirapalli SSA area against an equipped capacity of 3,66,662 lines. There were 2.48 lakh mobile phone connections, of which 27000 were in the post paid category, he said.

He said so far, 8 Mb bandwidth connections had been provided for 22 colleges in and around Tiruchirapalli, adding BSNL could provide its customers any band width ranging from 2 MB to 8 MB. He said efforts were being made to provide Multi Protocal Label System (MPLS) virtual private net work (VPN), a comprehensive solution for network and data transfer for corporate houses and financial institutions.